Recently I had the privilege to exchange thoughts at a roundtable discussion about the Future of Managed Services with our strategic partner Presidio. I would like to share some highlights from that dynamic dialogue.

We all agreed, the services industry overall is heading to a tipping point. Managed services are becoming more attractive to IT, and consequently the demand is growing exponentially. Our discussion focused on the key factors driving this demand and what managed service providers can do to stay ahead of customers’ needs.

Business leaders have ever growing expectations for increased IT speed and responsiveness. As the pace of change in business grows ever quicker, IT needs to become “Fast IT” – delivering new solutions at a more rapid pace In order to do that, IT needs to be able to integrate and automate all support interactions that it’s responsible for delivering.

Customer needs can change in a heartbeat. To meet these needs, organizations and service models have to be more fluid in order to adapt to the ebb and flow of the customer’s business. This embodies a new type of relationship between the customer and the managed services provider. Customers may want to use one service model for a few months or for a few years, changing models as the business changes – gone are the rigid, long-term outsource agreements that lock customers into one model for many years. Ryan Jordan, VP of Managed Services at Presidio put it well:

“Customers want more flexibility from their managed services providers. It’s true that just off-loading managed services allows IT to be faster on their feet. But offering a managed service that is also flexible and responsive adds tremendously to the goals of Fast IT.”

A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work in an era of ever changing business needs. For instance, rolling out a new application and updating the infrastructure to support the trading desks for a global financial services company requires a different service approach from supporting the operations for a hospital.

A standardized cookie-cutter approach gives you better economies of scale, which supports profitability, but can sacrifice the opportunity to customize offerings by industry or customer. This can affect your competitiveness. The future of managed services is in tailored solutions that meet the specific needs of customers and can adjust as the relationship develops over time.

Presidio and Cisco are working together to implement a new model – built on a foundation of real-time service integration. In this model customers, managed service providers and the technology vendors are all connected in real-time. It creates a new level of transparency and collaboration, speeding resolution times and ensuring all parties have a common view of what’s happening as its happening.

Welcome to the Cisco Sizzle! Each month, we’re rounding up the best of the best from across our social media channels for your reading pleasure. From the most read blog posts to the top engaging content on Facebook or LinkedIn, catch up on things you might have missed, or on the articles you just want to see again, all in one place.

Let’s take a look back at the top content from May…

Work-Life Balance … Or Work-Life Integration?Achieving a work-life balance can be tough, but Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrior takes a different approach. Instead of trying to balance the demands of work and home separately, she embraces integration and combines the two together whenever she can.

IoE: Powering Supply Chain ManagementCisco is connecting the Internet of Everything to get supply chains perfectly linked. Watch this video to explore how IoE instigates meaningful actions to happen faster.

Cisco Ranks High With Young ProfessionalsCareer Bliss recently compiled a list of the top 10 companies where young employees are happiest, based on more than 48,000 employee-generated reviews. It’s no surprise to us – Cisco was ranked as #5 overall! Many thanks to our employees for this honor – you make us happy, too!

How Organized is Your Cabling?Any IT guru will agree: this is an amazing feat of organization. Extra credit to anyone who can keep cabling in line like this!

What Keeps a CEO Up At Night?In this latest installment of Leadership@Cisco, Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers talks about his love for adventure, the importance of family and the characteristics that make a good leader. Learn what he’s most passionate about, where he sees technology going in the future and what keeps him up at night in this video.

Cloud Curious?Cloud computing is fundamentally changing the way businesses and people consume information. It is enabling IT as a service, evolving collaboration and changing content delivery. See for yourself how Cisco is helping service providers of all sizes navigate the world of many clouds:

Coordinated Attacks Against the U.S. Government and Banking InfrastructureIn this blog post, Mike Schiffman and other Cisco employees inform us of a round of planned cyber attacks that have been launched against the U.S. government and banking systems. They provide an overview of the situation along with resources and best practices to prevent and respond to the attacks. For more information on how to protect against these attacks, don’t miss this post:

This is the first post in a new series from Dimension Data and Cisco Channels looking at user adoption and integration of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions. Findings stem from Dimension Data’s 2013 Global UC&C Survey, developed with ICT researcher Ovum and featuring responses from more than 2,700 participants in 18 countries across 20 vertical industries.

We’ve all heard that selling UC&C solutions has to be less about flashy technology, and more about a comfortable, productive user experience. In other words, are video sessions, presence and other UC&C functions as easy and convenient to use as a traditional voice call? But user adoption of UC&C isn’t by any means the last step in a UC&C implementation. It’s actually a lot closer to the first step, as Neill Hart puts it.

“We don’t have to worry about user adoption with most other areas of IT,” says Hart, converged communications director for Dimension Data Europe. “If you put in a firewall on a Sunday night, for example, it’s at work the next morning and the user probably isn’t even aware it’s there. With most technologies, the user doesn’t even worry about it. But with UC&C, it’s everything. If I’m not entirely comfortably with technology, then I can find a way of not using it.” Read More »

As world leaders ponder how to meet the growing demand for energy and resources, while reducing global carbon emissions, cities are challenged even further. The exponential growth of cities has resulted in enormous urban challenges: scarcity of resources; skyrocketing passenger, cargo, and digital traffic; and outdated and overloaded infrastructures.

The continued expansion of the Internet and our society’s increased connectivity seemingly amplify these urban challenges. However, Cisco and Schneider Electric see an opportunity to create a new future for cities, and they are already making cities more efficient and connected today.

The key is transforming a city from the inside out:

Developing an efficient infrastructure for the utilities network, transportation systems, buildings, and public services.

Adding connectivity to integrate these efficiency solutions, and including people in the social conversation.

Reducing carbon emissions and environmental consequences of urban life to ensure sustainability.

This transformation requires that the city’s operating systems, such as utilities and transportation, function with optimal efficiency, allowing data collection for operations optimization. In order to solve the “pain points” that negatively affect city residents (such as power outages), it is critical to optimize each individual system, as well as the overall structure and connections among systems. Efficient integrated operating systems that create connections will improve services, offer better information sharing, and enhance a city’s sustainability and livability, transforming it into a Smart City.

The Cisco Process Orchestrator has very rich integration capabilities, yet we often hear the question, “Does it integrate with…” or “Does it work with” [insert product]. The Cisco Process Orchestrator is a primary component in the Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud management solution.

The fact is that in modern environments with modern orchestrators the answer is always yes. The reality is that cloud automation requires a Process Orchestrator tie into a variety of different systems in order to start offering cloud services. Remember, Cloud is an operating model, not a product. This means that to deliver self-service, on-demand services requires all the elements of the service be orchestrated.

The graphic below shows the components in the deployments. You see integration with Cisco UCS, VMware and storage, as you would expect. It also orchestrates IP address management (that IP won’t provision itself), Remedy incident, CMDB, ActiveDirectory (so tenants can log in), image management and a few other things such as Service Assurance.

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